Nuclear medicine! Get a half life

Paul Schaffer from TRIUMF - Canada’s national laboratory for particle and nuclear physics and accelerator-based science - gives a Perimeter Institute public lecture on how accelerators are used to develop diagnostic and therapeutic medical tools and techniques

I reviewed Michael Hiltzik’s excellent book “Big Science: Ernest Lawrence and the Invention that Launched the Military-Industrial Complex” for Nature recently. Lawrence built the first particle accelerators, and started a chain of technological advances which has currently got us as far as the Large Hadron Collider at CERN, where I do my science. I was, and am, well aware of the many other uses of accelerators beyond particle physics, but it was a surprise to me, reading Hiltzik’s book, to discover that medical applications featured so early on in Lawrence’s programme at Berkeley. Indeed, they seem to have played a comparable role to that of basic physics research in motivating his push for bigger and better machines.

Dr Paul Schaffer is Associate Laboratory Director of TRIUMF’s Life Sciences Division, and is giving a public lecture on where nuclear medicine has got to now. The video will appear below live, and a recording will be uploaded to the same place afterwards. You can sign up for an email reminder here.

GET A HALF-LIFE: ISOTOPES AS THE UNLIKELY HERO OF MODERN MEDICINE
PAUL SCHAFFER, TRIUMF

Incidentally Nuclear Magnetic Resonance (NMR) machines were renamed Magnetic Resonance Imaging (MRI), at least in part because “Nuclear” makes people nervous. So I love it that “Nuclear Medicine” is still a thing.

The thumbnail image for this article (bigger version below) shows a hoarding outside the medical accelerator complex under construction next to UCL for proton therapy.